


Life on the Other Side

by atamascolily



Category: The Adventures of Sinbad (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coffee Shops, Filling In the Gaps, Gen, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 21:03:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12197373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: Master Dim-Dim gets a call from his apprentice, Maeve, under the most unexpected circumstances....Or, the "Coffee Shop story that no one asked for" that still manages to be canon compliant.





	Life on the Other Side

**Author's Note:**

> So we saw what happened when Maeve reached out to Dim-Dim at the beginning of 1x13, "The Masked Marauders". But what did it look like from Dim-Dim's perspective? What has he been up to all this time, anyway?
> 
> .... As usual, I have opinions about this.

The old man sat in the corner of the coffee shop, doodling absently on a piece of scrap paper while he puzzled over the crossword puzzle in the newspaper. A mug of tea, long since forgotten and cold, was perched perilously close to the edge of the table, while a smartphone lay partially buried under the jumbled editorials. Sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating him in a sea of golden light, seemingly devoid of shadows. 

None of the other patrons were paying the slightest bit of attention to him, which was unsurprising given how utterly unremarkable and unobtrusive he was. The bright pink track suit might have given anyone observant a bit of a pause - or at least a chuckle at its violent, almost aggressive cheerfulness - but so far, no one had bothered to look up from their phones long enough to form an opinion one way or the other. Besides, it was Florida. Stranger things happened every day there, and were detailed with loving care in the local sections of the paper. 

"Hmm - 10 down. Tricky. Very tricky." He twirled the pen in the air, humming quietly to himself. "Ah! Very good! I have it! 'Spontaneity'!" 

When Dim-Dim had first arrived, he'd been blown into what he thought was another plane of existence by the demon Admir. It was even more disorienting to learn that he had actually been transported almost five hundred years into the future - to an entirely different continent, in fact. To make matters worse, he'd arrived in an era where the magic he had studied his entire life was considered quackery at best and against the natural order at worse. 

The demon had cleverly blocked Dim-Dim from accessing his considerable store of magic, so while he could still do small, relatively unobtrusive things like create a protective glamour or change the color of a rose bush, bigger, more dramatic displays like fireballs and windstorms were right out. Trying to explain his situation or details of his whereabouts to anyone, he'd also discovered, were out, too. Effectively, he was trapped.

That said, it was a pleasant enough existence - if very different from what he was used to. The flush toilets, for instance, had been a surprise, as had the technological advances (a much more pleasant discovery). In many cases, these offered quick and easy substitutes for the wizardry he could no longer use: cell phones, for instance. He'd acquired a taste for the oddest dishes: frozen TV dinners and chocolate chip cookies, as well as the homemade pitas and tabboulehs from the Mediterranean deli down the street that transported him back to his childhood in Thessaly so many years ago. 

There were good people who had taken him in, helped him get settled and adjusted. They'd assumed he was an elderly, confused immigrant from the Old World with a shaky grasp of English. They were not, in fact, wrong. 

And it was still hot here (though more humidity than he had ever experienced in his entire life back in the Old World). He could still grow roses. He didn't think he would have enjoyed living in the frozen north quite as much. Or the demon could have trapped him in some gloomy purgatory or fiery hell for thousands of years. Or slowed time. There were a lot of worse places to be than Florida, that was for sure. 

Even in Florida, though, pink turbans and flowing robes earned you more than a few stares. He'd tried to blend in a bit, but one could only compromise so much - he did enjoy pink, after all. And what was the point of life if you weren't enjoying yourself while helping others at the same time? 

Try as he might, he could not summon the power to get home. Every time he attempted it, the results were the same: complete and utter failure. The way was blocked. He could occasionally succeed at reaching back long enough to manipulate items in his past era - bodiless, like a ghost - or speak. But even those tantalizing successes drained his energy and left him weak and impotent for a long time afterwards. His only hope of rescue was that clever Sinbad and Maeve - working together - would be able to find him eventually and restore him to his true era. 

Otherwise, well, it wasn't a bad life. There was still plenty of magic here in this world if you knew where to look for it - love, patience, kindness, friendship, the miracle of a rosebud opening to its fullest glory. And he WOULD miss the lattes. 

On the table beside him, the phone flared, buzzing and throbbing like it had been suddenly possessed. "Ah, what's this?" He'd bought one more for the novelty value than anything else - and its ability, as a portable book, to show him the text of almost any work commonly available on this marvelous 'InterWeb' thingy. But for someone to call him now - since he hadn't given anyone the number - 

CALL FROM MAEVE, the display read. A tagged geopoint told him that she was reaching out to him across vast distances of space and time, from a spot in the ocean just offshore of the kingdom of Mirhago, in the Mediterranean Sea. Presumably, she was aboard Sinbad's ship, the Nomad, rather than floating adrift on the high seas by herself, but one could never tell. Best not to assume too much. 

He picked up the phone and accepted the call, unable to stop grinning. She'd done it! She'd reached out to him! Maybe now was the opportunity he'd been waiting for to tell them - 

"DIM-DIM!" Maeve's voice crackled out of the phone, a little distorted by the lag caused by the extreme time and distance between them. Given that there was no satellite reception where she was (satellites would not be invented, despite her companion Firouz's ideas to the contrary, for another four hundred years or so), the reception was pretty good. Her magic must have grown considerably stronger since Dim-Dim had lst seen her. 

"You have done well to reach me," he said happily, aware that she would take it for the great compliment as it was. She was so sensitive to that sort of thing - it was one of her greatest strengths and weaknesses all rolled into one. So easy to encourage - so easily discouraged, too, when things went wrong. 

"Dim-Dim, where are you?" 

Even if he had been able to explain it to her in a way that she could understand, the terms of the curse forebade it. He'd already experimented with that and failed several times. So he had to stay cheerful, upbeat, gnomic - and frustratingly vague. "You must only listen. You are close to my friend. You are close to Mirhago."

"...Mirhago," he repeated, picturing in his mind the massive tome of magic that Maeve carried with her. He could still manipulate THAT, at least. He imagined flipping it to the appropriate page. Maybe that would be enough to get her on the right path towards the truth? 

"No, wait!" He could feel their connection slipping away. From the tone of her voice, she could feel it, too, and was fighting it desperately. 

"The power that holds me forbids me to stay," he told her sadly. 

"Please!" she begged. "No-!" 

... and the call dropped. Silence. He set the phone down slowly, stared at its blank screen, momentarily at a loss. 

"Ah, well," he said finally, when he had recovered his bearings. "Such a clever little device." He beamed at the phone, patting it affectionately. "An excellent tool for a magician in this era. And Maeve's making such extraordinary progress with her magic, too! Time with Sinbad has been good for her." He chuckled. "I told her it was all about confidence."

And who knows? He'd sent them to his old roommate Dinar, who was a pretty credible magician - "the truest of all who practice the arts of white magic," he'd written in his book. Well, it wasn't a lie... but he did remember that one incident with the ox that hadn't ended so well. To be fair, they'd both been pretty drunk at the time... 

Anyway, perhaps Dinar would be able to set two of the most promising and capable students he'd ever trained on the right track. Perhaps he'd be able to give them enough information so that they could break the curse and retrieve him. Perhaps soon enough he'd be back in his old clothes, in his old life. Perhaps - 

In the meantime, however, there was that one clue for 27 Down he hadn't been able to figure out... 

Humming quietly to himself, the old man went back to his crossword puzzle. No one in the shop paid any attention to him. It was, after all, just another day in the modern world.


End file.
